Free Republic

ALBANY – District Attorney David Soares launched a three-pronged juvenile justice reform initiative Tuesday to allow non-violent felony defendants between the ages of 16 and 24 to resolve their cases without a criminal record or any time behind bars. "What would a reformed criminal justice system look like ... if we came together and really imagined it?" Soares asked at a news conference in the jury room of the Albany County Judicial Center. "These projects, if applied and engaged in at the same time, we believe will lead to tremendous criminal justice reforms." The initiative — which began as a...

A handful of video recordings of the alleged racial assault on three black University at Albany students last weekend do not clearly show the women being attacked on a bus by a large group including white men, two community leaders who saw the recordings said Friday. The videos also contain no audible racial slurs — though the audio quality is often "bad" and sometimes nonexistent, said Common Council President Carolyn McLaughlin and Alice Green, a longtime social justice activist in the city. But Green and McLaughlin, both leaders in the city's African- American community, stopped short of questioning the women's...